entitled: time loop
summary: She's been living in a time loop for the last three months. Or has it been six already? The loop is maybe three frames long. The first frame is the hook. —PaulSarah. Canon.
warnings: Spoilers for Season 3, Episode 5, "Scarred by Many Past Frustrations," and forever after.
disclaimer: I do not own Orphan Black.
notes: Because I cannot get over this scene. Or any of this.
She's been living in a time loop for the last three months. Or has it been six already? The loop is maybe three frames long. The first frame is the hook.
He opens the door. He doesn't look happy. Sarah can barely remember the last time he was. Was he ever truly happy? Did he ever have a moment of peace? She would shuffle these questions in her head. On occasion, she would entertain the thought that they shared a brief period of a muted kind of happiness together.
He is wearing a leather jacket and it doesn't look bad on him. It's grown on her since the time loop began. He sees her in the cell, her chin rested up against the barred window of the cell door. The first frame is the most surprising. It catches her off-guard every time. He opens the door. It's a smooth step through the doorframe. She sees him and she curses herself for feeling that twinge of hope.
She has learned to linger longer in this frame. To feel his familiarity.
The next frame is the most conflicted. He's walking towards her and again, he does not look happy. He looks pissed, like he could have reached through the bars and strangled her himself. Sarah is faintly annoyed by all this because she didn't ask to be locked up in a prison cell at some shady base in Mexico. But she wasn't going to get into that because aside from his angry look, Paul looked almost pained to see her.
And he was. And she couldn't understand any of it because Paul never made it easy to understand. Perhaps she would always be grasping at who he was—who he was without Afghanistan, without the monitoring and the lies and Beth, without playing every side, every angle, without Castor and Leda.
Who would Paul be without all this?
The third frame is the most volatile. All you had to do was stay away. It burned her from the inside now.
What he had sacrificed. The precautions he had made. The decisions that he had to live with. His protection. His promise. His only request. Ruined in the single moment when they saw each other again in Mexico.
There was always a barrier between them. One looking in, one looking out. All you had to do was stay away.
She never should have met him. She should have walked the other way when Beth jumped in front of the train. She never should have gotten involved. All you had to do was stay away.
She messed it up from the beginning.
The time loop would last for ten minutes, maybe for two hours. Sometimes her mind would enter and leave the time loop several times a day. She didn't mind it now, though it drove her crazy at first. Her hallucination of him was so vivid in the beginning that she had to fight her subconscious to not physically reach out between the bars and touch him.
S said that it would go away, in time, but Sarah didn't want that. No, she wanted to keep the time loop. It was all she had left of him.
Perhaps the worst thing about the loop was that it has begun to blur into her reality. On the days where every door that opened could be Paul, she would take Kira to the park. No doors, no windows, no bars. They would walk the longest trail and she would force herself to remember the point of all this.